Flowcharting your AD Recovery Process

A flowchart that covers most of the high-level decisions you’re likely to encounter with recovering part or all of your Active Directory. Do you need to recover a domain controller? Should you rebuild the entire DC or can you just remove Active Directory from it? What do you do if it’s a DC with a FSMO role? What are your options for object recovery?

An aid for the IT generalist that needs quick help on the steps they need to take to get their AD healthy again.

A work in progress. It’s based on my nearly ten years of working with Intel’s worldwide Active Directory – but I make no pretense of knowing it all. It’s literally version 1.0, and I welcome your input in making it better.

It’s not a line by line operational document. It’s a decision process, leaving the details to you (e.g. “seize FSMO roles to another DC”).

It isn’t the be-all and end-all of all possible situations you may encounter. If you’re a full-time AD administrator you should already have something like this in your own procedures :).

It doesn’t (yet) contain an object recovery flowchart by operating system. In version 1.0 it does guide you through your object recovery  options depending on what OS your domain controllers are running.

A shining example of how to create a Visio flowchart, though I expect to get better. (Dammit Jim, I’m an AD guy, not a Visio expert!)